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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Song of Old Wyoming (PRC, 1945)

Charles and I decided to screen a movie I’d downloaded from
archive.org: Song of Old Wyoming, a 1945
PRC Western that in one respect followed in the 1930’s tradition — the hero,
Eddie Dean (playing a character simply named “Eddie”), sings and has (at least
until the end) a pretty sexless relationship with his leading lady, Vicky
Conway (Jennifer Holt — and it’s a measure of the relative unimportance of his
part that she’s billed fifth).
When the film opens he’s singing a song called “Hills of Old Wyoming” (by Leo
Robin and Ralph Rainger, considerably more illustrious songwriters than we
expect to see contributing to a PRC movie; the song, as I suspected, was
originally written in 1937 for a Hopalong Cassidy movie at Paramount called
Hills of Old Wyoming) as he and Vicky are
riding together in front of a herd of cattle belonging to Vicky’s (adoptive)
mother, Ma Conway (Sarah Padden, whose gutsy no-nonsense performance makes this
movie). One thing that distinguishes Song of Old Wyoming from most “B” Westerns is it was shot in color — the
Cinécolor process, which wasn’t as vibrant and bright as three-strip
Technicolor but at its best (the color preservation in this print is quite
variable) it has a burnished, painterly quality reminiscent of two-strip at its
best even though Cinécolor was ahead of Technicolor in the early 1930’s in its
ability to reproduce blue. The color probably upped the production budget
(imdb.com estimates this film’s cost as $36,000, which was cheap even then) if
only because they almost certainly had to hire their own cattle to represent Ma
Conway’s herds because no stock shots of cattle would have been available in
color. Aside from that it’s a pretty
typical old-Western plot except for one interesting character, the Cheyenne
Kid, in which Robert Emmett Tansey (producer and director, though he lopped off his last name and was
billed only as “Robert Emmett”) and Frances Kavanaugh (“original” screenwriter)
actually created a multidimensional character, genuinely torn between evil and
good, though they did too little with him.

The film takes place in 1890 and
deals with an attempt by a crooked banker, Jesse Dixon (Robert Barron), and a
crooked territorial politician, Lee Landow (Ian Keith, on the downgrade since
being considered for Dracula in the 1931 film and playing Saladin in Cecil B.
DeMille’s The Crusades in 1935),
who want to drive Ma Conway’s ranch out of business, shut down her paper — the Laramie
Bulletin, which despite the disinclination
of her editor (Horace Murphy, who comes off so much like Erskine Sanford in Citizen
Kane one wonders if he moved out West and
took the job at the Bulletin
after Charles Foster Kane fired him from the New York Inquirer) runs scathing exposés about the crookedness of the
territorial government and is pushing for the admission of Wyoming to the U.S.
as a state (the reverence in Kavanaugh’s script for the federal government as a
force that will provide the honest administration hitherto lacking in Wyoming
definitely dates this film!) — and, if necessary, kill him. To this end they
hire the Cheyenne Kid (Lash LaRue, still billed here under his first name “Al”
before his spectacular technique with a bullwhip — shown here in one thrilling
sequence — led him to spin off into a brief “B”-Western career ofhis own), only the Cheyenne Kid first
encounters Ma Conway on the trail and is helped by her and Eddie. She offers
him a job, and so he’s uncertain (to say the least!) when he then meets Landow
and Dixon (who communicate with each other via a wall-mounted telephone that
didn’t exist in 1890 — indeed, it’s hard to imagine that there was any sort of phone service in frontier Wyoming just 14
years after the telephone had been invented!) and finds that Ma is the person
he’s supposed to ruin and kill. He takes the job with her anyway, telling
Landow and Dixon he’ll do better at destroying her if he can work from the
inside, and he discovers her cash stash (behind a brick in the fireplace — not that old trick again!) and manages to work with Landow’s
and Dixon’s other gang members (including a green-shirted man named Ringo,
played by “Rocky Camron,” t/n Gene Alsace, who struck me as the sexiest guy in
the film) to rustle Ma’s cattle and make it look like they drowned.

The baddies
end up dynamiting the water hole so Ma’s cattle will die of dehydration, and
for good measure they blow up the office of the Laramie Bulletin — only the Cheyenne Kid finally turns against them, partly because he’s discovered
that he’s Ma Conway’s long-lost son (not that tired old gimmick again!), who was kidnapped by the
white desperadoes who ambushed her wagon train two decades earlier when he was
just a boy, and partly because instead of paying him the money they’d promised
in gold, Dixon tries to palm him off with paper from his bank. Realizing they’re
trying to cheat him, the Kid holds up Dixon’s bank, taking only enough gold to
cover what he was supposed to be paid, then gives the money to Ma and dies in a
shoot-out between Landow’s and Dixon’s gang and the ranch hands at Ma’s ranch. Much more could have been done to dramatize this
character’s crisis of conscience, but he’s still the most interesting member of
the dramatis personae — without
him (and the Cinécolor) this would be just another “B” Western, with Eddie Dean
singing three songs that sound like just about every other song written for a
singing-cowboy film, with lots of mentions of old strays, corrals, cayuses (I
guess it just had more rhymes than “horse”) and roundups. Apparently Song
of Old Wyoming was the first of five
Cinécolor Westerns Eddie Dean made for PRC, and at least one of the others, Romance
of the West, sounds like it would be worth
seeing if only because it’s sympathetic to Native Americans. The imdb.com
synopsis reads, “The happy Indians live in Antelope Valley and Eddie is the new
Indian Agent. Everything seems fine until the town selectmen want the valley
occupied by the Indians because it contains silver. So they hire outlaw Indians
and Chico to start trouble hoping that the army will forcibly remove them from
the valley and they will claim it. But Father Sullivan and Eddie believe the
Indians are being wronged even though they cannot convince anyone else.” Now that sounds like it would be worth watching!